A lightweight hand gesture recognition in complex backgrounds

Hand Gesture Recognition (HGR) is widely used in human–computer interaction due to its convenience. However, there are still some challenges in real-world scenarios, such as recognizing hand gestures in the complex backgrounds. To this end, the paper proposes a two-stage HGR system to solve the above issue. Specifically, the first stage performs accurate segmentation to segment the hand from the background. The segmentation network combines dilated residual network, atrous spatial pyramid pooling module and a simplified decoder. The segmentation network can effectively determine hand region even in challenging backgrounds. In the second stage, the double-channel Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are presented to improve the recognition performance. The double-channel CNNs can learn features from the RGB input images and the segmented hand images separately. Experiment results show that the proposed method has an accuracy of 91.17% with the model size of 1.8 MB, both of which are better than other state-of-arts in hand gesture recognition. The method successfully constructed a lightweight model while keeping a high gesture recognition accuracy at final.